rods in the silly old
Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs;
but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I
am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out;
I am a revolutionist. But don't you see that all these real leaps
and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden--
to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?
Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order
to get HOME?'

"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I should accept that.'

"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained a second
thing to me.'

"`What do you mean?' I asked; `what thing?'

"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking across quite
suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last.
And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats.

"I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best
advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should
like to find out if he has produced any literary works.--Yours, etc.,
"Paul Nickolaiovitch."

There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept
the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again
without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.
"The Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks the special
ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way:--

"The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.--I am Wong-Hi,
and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest
of Fu. The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it
must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought.
I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this
temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.
But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.
The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees,
like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies
are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade,
and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is always ebony
and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.

"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly
seen any stirring in the tops of the green tree